‘Institutions’ and developing countries: the importance of building state

capability for implementation

‘Political Economy After the Crisis’Week 9

April 3, 2014

The problem: in developing countries…1. Historically unprecedented rates of progress, 1960-2. But low-hanging fruit mostly plucked

– Stopped doing horrible things (at scale)– Completed (or know how to do) most ‘logistical’ tasks

• Building schools, immunizing babies, paving roads

3. As development succeeds, importance of robust implementation capability only intensifies– Regulation, taxation, energy, criminal justice…

4. But trajectory of ‘institutional quality’ for most developing countries is flat, or declining

5. And current practice either ignores it…– …or deploys a fundamentally flawed approach

6. We can do better; here’s what it might look like

Mostly poor to mostly rich (?), 1700 – 2100Adapted from The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100

by Robert Fogel (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

1700 1800 1900 2000 2100

“Nearly everyone”

“Some”

% of the world that is ‘poor’ (i.e., hungry, dying prematurely)

?

?

The best of times…• For the average person, basic indicators of human

well-being have never been better– most MDGs met in most places– higher average levels of education in Bangladesh now

than France in 1960– relative (if not always absolute) levels of “dollar-a-day”

poverty declining almost everywhere– Rapid decline of pandemics, crippling diseases (polio),

famines, wars, etc • Charles Kenny, Stephen Pinker, Angus Deaton

– Over 20th C, life expectancy almost doubled

But ‘divergence, big time’...

…and ‘low capability’ organizations (QoG data): few successes; most countries going backwards…

Classification by levels of Quality of Government in 2008

Classification by pace of change in (normed) Quality of Government, 1998-2008Falling fast:(below -0.05 annual growth)

Stagnating (slow change, negative or positive)

Rising fastAbove 0.05 annual growth Row

totals

(Falling)below 0 but above -0.05 annual growth

(Rising)at or above 0 but below 0.05 annual growth

High:(above 6.50)

Countries BRN, MLT SGP BHS, CHL, ISR, KOR

TWN

Number 2 1 4 1 8Medium:(above 4.00 but below 6.50)

Countries ARG, BGR, BHR, BOL, CRI, GIN, GMB, GUY, HUN, IRN, JAM, LKA, MAR, MNG, MWI, NIC, PAN, PHL, POL, ROM, SUR, SYR, THA, TTO, TUN, ZAF

BGD, BRA, CUB, ECU, EGY, GHA, IND, JOR, MDG, MYS, OMN, PAK, PER, QAT, UGA, URY

AGO, ARE, BWA, CHN, CMR, DZA, ETH, KWT, LBN, MEX, SAU, VNM, ZMB

COL, IDN, TUR, TZA

Number 26 16 13 4 59Low:(below 4.00)

Countries CIV, COG, DOM, GAB, GTM, HTI, KEN, LBY, PNG, PRK, PRY, SLE, SLV, SOM, VEN, ZWE

BFA, HND, MLI, MOZ, SEN, TGO, ZAR

ALB, IRQ, MMR, NGA, SDN

GNB, LBR, NER

Number 16 7 5 3 31Totals 44 24 22 8 98

...for many (e.g., Haiti), glacial progress…

… even on ‘simple’ tasks• The capability of states to implement core

responsibilities remains (disturbingly) low– ‘Simple’ tasks (logistics)

• Delivering mail, dispensing drivers licenses• Getting teachers, doctors to just show up

– ‘Moderate’ tasks• Social protection programs (Gupta 2012)

– ‘Complex’ tasks• Land reform, Criminal justice, Regulation• Stagnating, declining ‘quality of government’• Unfinished historical tasks…

Czech Republic

Uruguay

Top quartile by income

Third quartile by income

Bottom half of countries by years

of schooling

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

100

90

90

90

60

43

30

9.2

21.2

0

Percent of 10 misaddressed letters coming back to USA within 90 days

Includes not just Somalia and Myanmar but Tanzania, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt, Russia, Mongolia, Cambodia, Honduras, Fiji, etc.

Source: Chong, et al (2012)

Delivering the mail (literally)—testing the post office in 157 countries

How current aid effort/thinking is allocated

Time

Design

Implementation

EvaluationEffort

Prestige Resources

Looking like a state: Isomorphic mimicry in the Solomon Islands

• RAMSI: $millions spent on state-of-the-art courthouse, jail, training of judges, police…– ‘Institutions’ => ‘Success’

• …vs ‘Justice Delivered Locally’, a decentralized system of island courts responding to everyday justice concerns of everyday people– ‘Success’ => ‘Institutions’

What we need

Time

Design

Implementation

EvaluationEffort

Prestige Resources

Implementing an alternativeProblem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA)

Part of the ‘Building State Capability’ ProgramCenter for International Development, Harvard

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/cid/programs/building_state_capability

1. Local Solutions for Local Problems

2. Pushing Problem Driven Positive Deviance

3. Try, Learn, Iterate, Adapt

4. Scale Learning through Diffusion • i.e., Communities of Practice

How PDIA differs

World Bank, Donors NGOs PDIA

What drives action?

Solutions (“institutional mono-cropping”, “best practice”, “accelerated modernization”)

Solutions (variety of antidotes – e.g. “participation” “community driven”)

Problem Driven—looking to solve particular problems

Planning for action

Lots of advance planning (implementation of secondary importance)

Boutique, starting very small with no plans for scale

Authorization of positive deviation, purposive crawl of the design space

Feedback loops

Monitoring (short, on financing and inputs) and Evaluation (long feedback loop on outputs, maybe outcomes)

Casual, geared to advocacy not learning

MeE: integration of rigorous “experiential” learning into tight feedback loops

ScaleTop-down—the head learns, implementation is just muscle (“political will”)

Small is beautiful…Or, just not logistically possible

Diffusion of feasible practice across organizations and communities of practitioners

Origins, Applications• PDIA’s source material

– History• Dan Carpenter on the origins of the US Post Office• David Tyack on the origins of the US education system• David Vincent on the origins of the UK education system• Alfred Chandler on origins of large corporations…

– Complexity Theory• In biology, in nature, in computing, in cities

– Social Science, Experience• Sociology of organizations (form ≠ function), ‘monocropping’• ‘Expertise’ as a limited source of legitimacy

• Applications– Health delivery reform, Indonesia– ‘Justice for the Poor’, World Bank– Public Financial Management reform (Andrews 2013)– Engaging with ‘fragile states’ Implementation is a collective capability, learned – like every other complex task

(music, languages) – by making lots of initial mistakes

Which way up? RCTs vs QICs

Eppstein et al (2012) “Searching the clinical fitness landscape” PLoS ONE: 7(11): e49901

More details at…• Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock (2013)

‘Escaping capability traps through Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA)’ World Development 51(11): 234-244

• Lant Pritchett, Michael Woolcock and Matt Andrews (2013) ‘Looking like a state: techniques of persistent failure in state capability for implementation’ Journal of Development Studies 49(3): 1-18

• Lant Pritchett, Salimah Samji and Jeffrey Hammer (2012) ‘It’s all about MeE: using structured experiential learning (‘e’) to crawl the design space’ Working Paper No. 104, WIDER (December 2012)

• Michael Woolcock (2013) ‘Using case studies to assess the external validity of “complex” development interventions’ Evaluation 19(3): 229-248